Public access mandates & policies

In keeping with a worldwide trend, the United States government is increasingly requiring public (open) access to government information and publications and data arising from federally funded research. The mandates acknowledge privacy and confidentiality concerns and call for compliance within existing legal constraints on the sharing of information. Institutions receiving federal grants are responsible for complying with federal mandates. Non-compliance may impact receipt of future grants.

In addition to U.S. federal public access mandates, authors need to be aware of mandates imposed by overseas funders, philanthropic foundations, and academic institutions. The number of public access mandates has been increasing steadily for years.

US Directives

US Directives

In the United States, requirements regarding public access to publications and data arising from federally funded research can be stipulated by the executive or legislative branches of the government. For example, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a public access directive in 2013. The Appropriations Act of 2014 requires selected federal agencies to provide public access to the research they fund.

Mandated public access to publications and data

In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research . The Memorandum, a.k.a. the OSTP Directive, directed federal agencies that fund more than $100 million in research to develop policies requiring public access and reâuse rights to peerâreviewed publications and digital data arising from that funding. The Directive went into effect immediately. Draft policies must be available for review by September 2013. The effective dates of the policies can be no sooner than the publication date of the agencyâs final plan. The Open Data Policy was issued in May 2013.

Pending legislation

Introduced in both the US Senate and House of Representatives in March, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act of 2015 would require each federal agency with extramural research expenditures exceeding $100 million to develop a public access policy. If passed into law, FASTR would require each federal agency to stipulate the following:

Authors must submit to the federal agency an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript of articles that (a) report on research supported by the agencyâs funding and (b) have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The final manuscript may be replaced with the final published version of the article if (a) the publisher allows it and (b) the goals of functionality and interoperability are retained.

Articles must be deposited in a digital repository that provides free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation, either a repository maintained by the agency or a repository that meets these conditions.

Free online public access to the articles must be provided no later than 6 months after publication.

Articles must be made freely available in formats and under terms that enable productive reuse, including computational analysis.

The agency must produce and maintain an online bibliography of all research papers publicly accessible under the policy, with each entry linking to the corresponding free online full text.

As of January 17, 2014, the United States federal government has a new set of open access mandates adopted as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014. Similar to the NIH public access policy, the Act directs affected agencies to develop public access policies that require:

Submission to the agency, or a designated entity acting on behalf of the agency, of a machine-readable version of the author's final peer-reviewed manuscript describing research supported by federal funding

Free online public access to the final peer-reviewed manuscript or published version in a trusted repository no later than 12 months after publication

Compliance will U.S. copyright law

The agencies affected by the public access provision in the Appropriations Act include: